Good to get that first execution under your belt, South Carolina. Now we can get on with working down a 13-year inventory of dead men walking. Shame on us.
Freddie Owens, a killer twice over, was himself killed by the state of South Carolina by lethal injection on Friday, the conclusion of a long campaign to end the moratorium on the death penalty and the beginning of a gruesome seven months ahead. The question isn’t whether Owens, 46, and five other convicted killers deserve to die at 35-day intervals, but whether the rest of us deserve to be forced to kill them. We should be better than that.
Death penalty advocates, led by Executioner-in-Chief Henry McMaster, battled through the courts for years to kill Freddie Owens. The Legislature authorized the use of the electric chair and firing squads after pharmaceutical distributors refused to provide drugs for states to use in injections. Then the Legislature last year passed a law keeping the drug companies’ participation secret. Gov. McMaster was quick to sign it.
Steve Bailey
Grace Beahm Alford gbeahm@postandcourier.com
“Justice has been delayed for too long in South Carolina,” McMaster said last September after notifying the courts that his Department of Corrections had secured the necessary drugs to resume lethal injections.
Now, a year later, the state-sponsored killing has begun.
South Carolina, which likes to boast it’s the fastest-growing state in America, can now brag about becoming a national leader in executions. Consider:
Texas, by far No. 1 in executions, killed eight people all of last year and three through the first eight months of this year. Florida executed six last year. Two other states, Missouri and Oklahoma, executed four each. Now South Carolina is scheduled to kill six convicted killers who have exhausted their appeals in just seven months, methodically working down its backlog like a used car dealer with too many clunkers on the lot.
Back in the good old days, South Carolina executed six men (all black) in a single day in 1931 and another six men (all white) on another day in 1939. The next seven months will be among the most deadly in modern South Carolina history. Six were executed in 1996, seven in 1998. Owens was page-one news, but will Nos. 4, 5 and 6 even make the evening news? And there will be another 29 people (all men) sitting on death row.
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Publish date : 2024-09-24 09:45:00
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